Lecture

Cedar Sigo Presents “Reality Is No Obstacle: A Poetics of Participation”

Thu, Sep 26, 2019

6:30 PM–8:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100)

Watch the video recording of this event below:

Join acclaimed Suquamish poet Cedar Sigo for his lecture “Reality Is No Obstacle: A Poetics of Participation” as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry in collaboration with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. This event is free and open to the public, but please click here to RSVP.

The scene changes and the political repression and violence in this country have become an inextricable part of our process as poets. This is no longer avoidable. Over the last three years, Cedar Sigo has taken to reading outright revolutionary poets like Diane di Prima, Audre Lorde, Jayne Cortez, Margaret Randall, Amiri Baraka and Joy Harjo. In this lecture, Sigo will use these poets, their works as well as their histories to suggest new forms as well as to pose questions. How can we aim our poems at the actual infrastructures of oppression? Poetry is never simply a set of words living alone upon the page, it exists as a perennial light in the mind, a tool of recognition that we must press into the hands of others.

The evening will be introduced by poet, translator, and teacher Ammiel Alcalay, General Editor ofLost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, on Joanne Kyger (Wave Books, 2017), and author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Royals (Wave Books, 2017), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), and two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005). He is currently working with Joy Harjo and others as a contributing editor to the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Native American Poetry. Recent work has appeared in Poetry and New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf, 2018) He lives in Lofall, Washington.

About the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with institutions nationwide.

Co-sponsored by The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

https://vimeo.com/362886029